PVOutput Uploader

If you have a CouchDB database, you can create a system on https://pvoutput.org and upload your output data.

Note

CouchDB is the only database that the PVOutput program works with

Note

It is recommended to configure SolarThing PVOutput on the same device as the CouchDB database. If this device is different than the one you installed SolarThing on, you can install SolarThing on this device too, just skip to this configuration after installing.

Setting up

Now we’ll change our directory to the pvoutput directory and start editing its config:

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Before we begin, setup a directory (or use part of an existing directory) to contain pvoutput configuration.

Here is an example file structure incorporating the CouchDB container we set up and the SolarThing server container we set up:

~/Documents/containers/solarthing/
├── couchdb/
│   ├── data/
│   └── etc/
├── server/
│   ├── config/
│   │   ├── application.properties
│   │   └── couchdb.json
│   └── logs/
├── pvoutput/
│   ├── config/
│   │   ├── base.json
│   │   └── couchdb.json
│   └── logs/
└── docker-compose.yml

mkdir -p ~/Documents/containers/solarthing/pvoutput/{config,logs}
cd ~/Documents/containers/solarthing/
nano docker-compose.yml

You should now be editing docker-compose.yml. If it is the case that you already have a docker-compose file, you may append to it. If you do not already have this file, you may paste the contents below exactly as is:

services:
  couchdb:
    # ...
  server:
    # ...
  # You may have other services defined here already
  #   If that is the case, just append the following configuration to your file:
  pvoutput:
    image: 'ghcr.io/wildmountainfarms/solarthing:latest'
    container_name: solarthing-pvoutput
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    command: run --base config/base.json
    volumes:
      - './pvoutput/config:/app/config:ro'
      - './pvoutput/logs:/app/logs'

Now let’s edit base.json:

nano pvoutput/config/base.json

base.json

Paste this into your base.json file:

{
  "type": "pvoutput-upload",
  "system_id": 100,
  "api_key": "<YOUR API KEY>",
  "database": "config/couchdb.json",
  "source": "default"
}

Note

Make sure the couchdb.json file you refer to exists in a location that is accessible to SolarThing via the path you provide.

You may copy the config file from server/config/couchdb.json to pvoutput/config/couchdb.json if you already have a configuration file in that location.

In the above example, 100 is the system id. You should replace this with whatever your system id is.

Replace <YOUR API KEY> with your API key.

couchdb.json

Here’s an example couchdb.json file to put in pvoutput/config/couchdb.json:

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{
  "type": "couchdb",
  "config": {
    "url": "http://couchdb:5984"
  }
}

Note

The PVOutput program only reads from the database, so assuming you set up CouchDB using SolarThing’s CouchDB Setup tool, then you don’t need to specify a username and password.

Running the program

Now let’s run it:

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cd ..
sudo docker compose up

You should see a bunch of log messages. Some of the log messages should indicate success in uploading to PVOutput.

Running in background

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Running any docker container in the background is trivial with docker compose:

sudo docker compose up -d

Now you’re done! Navigate to your system on PVOutput and you should see one data point. SolarThing will upload every 5 minutes, so after some time it’ll be a cool graph!